WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I have a thousand (all right, mostly “used,” but so does a real library) Israel history books, ancient and modern. A few of them are truly gripping reading. I’d acquaint you with these, not just as entertainment (though they are that), but in bolstering our knowledge of our people’s own homeland history in answering Jewish homeland-delegitimizing canards like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free!” Come walk with me through my bookshelves.
Eyes We Have, But We Read Not; and If Not Now, When?
“Gentle Reader, come with me for a walk.”
“How long a walk?”
“Three thousand years.”
“What’s the route?”
“Through my personal library bookshelves (all right, shared with a parrot) of a thousand (actually, my database says 1021) Jewish homeland history volumes, built through a half-century’s haunting of used book stores and Jewish neighborhood library book sales.”
“Couldn’t you have just collected stamps or coins like normal folks?”
“No. I’ve long been obsessed that a seminal Jewish history event, our Jewish homeland’s sovereign rebirth after eighteen hundred years, “the struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations,” Ben-Gurion called it, is occurring right now in our lifetime, and that we uniquely well-off American Jews owe it to every exiled Jew who ever died in a pogrom, an Inquisition, a Holocaust, “al-Kiddush-Hashem” as we so euphemistically put it, and who in a heartbeat would trade places with us, to know our people’s homeland history and defend that the land of Israel, with historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria as its heart & soul, is our people’s, not Arabs’.
Don’t get me wrong, almost seven decades later I still regard high school history textbooks, at least the ones to which I’d been subjected, as the dullest books ever written, but there are gripping, moving at least to us, homeland Jewish history books, and a handful of these are what I recommend in this #1209.
Right Now
Ok, this week I was reading Michael Oren’s quite thorough but readable Six Days of War when this month’s library book sale came up, and among the “Judaica” I found there was his Ally, a memoir of his Aliyah and life in Israel, including his time as Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. during the Obama administration. Fascinating, but eerie. The book is copyrighted 2015, but it could have been yesterday – Israel fighting Hamas in Gaza, being accused of “genocide,” etc., with still current principal characters – Bibi, Hillary Clinton, Biden, Kerry, Abbas et al. The book ends before UNSC 2334, pity, but it says that the, by me fatal for Israel, “two-states along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” was originally a Palestinian Arab demand picked up over time by the U.S. Oren, an American who became Israeli, a paratrooper, an ambassador and then an MK, brings to his support of “the two-state solution” rather more credentials than I bring to my opposition, but he’s a good man who wrote a couple good books and I commend them.
Yom Kippur War
On the Yom Kippur War, which though it ended well for us I long found difficult to read about, Chaim Herzog’s The War of Atonement is moving and informative, as is Abraham Rabinovich’s The Yom Kippur War. It’s important to understand how Israel had been lulled into surprise, initially almost overwhelmed, but mobilized and came back, and as with all Israel’s wars, the roles of the powers that be, and how the war was brought to an end and what occurred in its wake.
The Six Day War
If you would read just one book on the Six Day War (my database says I have 32, and on this subject I think I’ve read them all), I’d have it be Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate. It’s not a full account of all battles, but follows a few fighter and helicopter pilots, paratroopers, armor corps and reconnaissance troops and commanders, “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet” as Pressfield successfully puts it, and movingly captures what the mobilization and wait, the fighting and above all historic Jerusalem’s liberation meant to Israelis, told by Israelis in the first person. Well done. By me, Eric Hammel’s Six Days in June, Ruth Bondy et al (eds.) Mission Survival, Yael Dayan’s Israel Journal, Robert Moskin’s Among Lions, Abraham Rabinovich’s The Battle for Jerusalem and Shabtai Teveth’s The Tanks of Tammuz are moving reads.
Modern Israel’s Early Days
Netanel Lorch’s The Edge of the Sword is the standard work on Israel’s War of Independence, but it’s a long book and not easy read. More readable is Dan Kurzman’s Genesis 1948. Collins and Lapierre’s O Jerusalem is a moving account, alas scarred by a one-sided view of Deir Yassin. I would have you focus on American Jews’ involvement for Israel, extremely well put in my view by Jeffrey and Craig Weiss in I Am My Brother’s Keeper, by Leonard Slater in The Pledge and by Murray Greenfield and Joseph Hochstein’s The Jews’ Secret Fleet: The Untold Story of North American Volunteers Who Smashed the British Blockade of Palestine. On official U.S. involvement with today’s Israel’s early days, James McDonald’s My Mission in Israel is good.
The Struggle Against the British
Menachem Begin’s The Revolt is standard reading for the world’s revolutionaries, and ought to be for American Jews. But if there is one Israel genre packed with moving reading, it’s the Briha and Aliyah Bet, Palestinian Jews’, American WWII vets’ and other volunteers’ courageous struggle to aid Holocaust survivors’ escape from Europe before, during and especially after the Holocaust and sailing them in rickety ships into the teeth of the anti-Jewish British Palestine blockade. The database says I have 28 books in this category. Several of course are on Exodus 1947, of which I particularly commend to you acclaimed Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s bio of Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus (and Keneseth Israel and the Pans), Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus, Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling, Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine (rev. ed. Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation) and David Holly’s Exodus 1947. On other Aliyah Bet ships, I commend to you Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua and Rudolph Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade. On the Briha, the clandestine gathering and movement of Europe’s Jews before, during (took incredible guts) and after WWII to Aliyah Bet ports, I commend to you as quite gripping Ehud Avril’s personal account, Open the Gates, and also moving I.F. Stone’s Underground to Palestine and Howard Blum’s The Brigade.
Zionist Movement
In the heyday of my custom business software development company, I had a young man, bar-mitzvahed and all that, working for me who came in one day and asked what was that book I was reading. “Trial & Error,” I said, “the auto-biography of Dr. Chaim Weizmann.” “Who?” Must reading for today’s American Jews. As is at least a chunk of Herzl’s Jewish State. “Partly naïve,” Dr. Weizmann called it in his Foreword to the edition I have, but it launched a thousand ships, all right, most of them British destroyers.
Ok, a test of commitment to Zionism: Marvin Lowenthal’s English translation of Herzl’s thick Diaries, a deeper view of the man than from Jewish State. And how’s this? He wrote in 1897 just after the First Zionist Congress he’d called that “at Basel I founded the Jewish state,” that if he said so aloud everyone would laugh, but that in five years perhaps and certainly in fifty years everyone would perceive it. In 1947, with the U.N.’s vote to partition Palestine west of the River into Arab and Jewish states, fifty years to the year, everyone did.
Between Hadrian and Herzl
Among the many factual mistakes we Zionists ourselves make in making our case is that we were exiled from our homeland by the Romans after their defeating of our Bar Kochba Revolt in CE 135 and that we essentially returned in the Zionist movement. But the truth is we weren’t exiled by Rome. Historian James Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine (pp. 44-45):
“The population remained as it had been before the loss of independence, primarily peasants and landowners…. Jewish villages were thickly scattered in the hills and valleys of the region.”
And we remained, increasingly diminished under exclusively foreign empire rule to a pummeled but organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming minority, all the way into modern times. Parkes (p. 266) put it this way:
“It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.” [emphasis added]
He put the consequence of our folly this way (ibid):
“The omission allowed the anti-Zionist, whether Jewish, Arab or European, to paint an entirely false picture of the wickedness of Jewry in trying to re-establish a two-thousand-year-old claim to the country, indifferent to everything that had happened in the intervening period.”
Samuel Katz, in his classic work Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, acknowledging Parkes, wrote that “the gap between what is generally known and the facts of the continuity of Jewish life in Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple” is an “astonishing area of Jewish neglect.” Then Prime Minister Begin, in his 1977 Foreword to Battleground’s second edition: “The most moving chapter in the book is that on the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine.”
So taken was I with all this that I wrote my own book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, documenting Parkes that we were always present and that diaspora ever returned. I quoted Samuel Katz in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine (p. 97), on the role in homeland Jewish history that “Zionism” actually played:
“Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organization were new. The living movement to the land had never ceased.”
Citing some of the more recent exile return occurrences, I summed up my own book (p. 141):
“And so too has it been in every age the presence, beacon, magnet of the Yishuv, at times diminished to a pummeled minor minority, that has made the millennia-long return of countless generations of Jews possible, even thinkable, and formed the continuous generational link between ancient Israelites and Israelis today.”
Ancient Israel
Another counter-productive misstatement of history we ourselves make, which I repeatedly read, is our diminishing the Temple Mount’s structure as it remains in situ today down to the Western Wall being its only remaining remains. I beg you to read Leen and Kathleen Ritmeyer’s Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (fuller version, The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem). In a Sherlock Holmes-worthy chain of observation of extant structures and reasoning, Ritmeyer lays out not only the extent to which Herod’s Second Temple’s Temple Mount still stands, but where the First Temple’s 500 sq. cubit Mount had lain, where on the Mounts the First and Second Temples had stood, and where in their Holy of Holies Mount Moriah’s summit, es-Sakra, the Rock, had served as their floor. And on that Rock, Ritmeyer builds “quite a good case,” Biblical Archeology Review’s Hershel Shanks wrote, is still to be seen in the Dome of The Rock the slot carved by King Solomon three millennia ago where the Ark of the Covenant stood.
Reading Our History Books and Making Our Homeland Case
Every time, which these days is virtually every day, the mainstream Western media calls Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, Temple Mount and all, “occupied Palestinian territory,” and we remain silent, we ourselves are perpetrating a Shanda on our own people’s homeland history. Read a couple of these Jewish homeland history books (Amazon, Abe) and so fortified with historical facts, help make our Jewish homeland case. As Mordechai put it to Esther long ago this very night, perhaps that’s why we’re now here.